Stop hate speech against women on Facebook

Posted by Collective Shout1842sc on May 28, 2013

[UPDATE] WIN! Facebook responds, commits to change

From Women, Action and the Media:

"..."In a statement released today, Facebook addressed our concerns and committed to evaluating and updating its policies, guidelines and practices relating to hate speech, improving training for its content moderators and increasing accountability for creators of misogynist content." Read more about Facebook's commitment here.

Read the open letter to Facebook and join the campaign

A global campaign is calling on Facebook to clamp down on content glorifying rape, domestic violence and other forms of violence against women.

Collective Shout has signed an open letter to Facebook along with women's advocates and organisations around the world. We invite you to join the campaign calling on companies to withdraw advertising until Facebook takes action to remove content glorifying violence against women.

Here's an excerpt of the letter:

We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook. Specifically, we call on you, Facebook, to take three actions:

Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.

Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

To this end, we are calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site. (We will be raising awareness and contacting advertisers on Twitter using the hashtag #FBrape.)

The campaign has already had significant success, with a number of companies agreeing to pull their ads. Join the campaign today. Your voice makes a difference.

You can defend their right to childhood

Everyday our young people are exposed to more brands continuing to sexualise girls and objectify women. You can bring change to this sexploitation, stop companies from degrading women and prevent its devastating effects on young people.